Jason Blum has made it clear many times over the years that he’d love to bring the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises into the Blumhouse family alongside Halloween and The Exorcist, which is certainly always a possibility in the future. The Friday rights are still tangled up in a legal mess, of course, but what’s the latest on the Elm Street franchise?
Speaking with Screen Rant while promoting The Black Phone last week, Jason Blum indicated that if Blumhouse is able to get into bed with Freddy, he’s confident he’d be able to get Robert Englund back to play the Dream Demon one more time. This despite Englund saying several times in recent years that his days of donning the makeup are probably behind him.
“I could make him come back,” Blum tells Screen Rant. “I could get anyone back. I mean, Ellen Burstyn was 87, I got her back in [the upcoming sequel to] The Exorcist.”
“75… he’s young,” Blum continues, referring to Englund.
It’s been a few years since we’ve heard a peep about the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, with Bloody Disgusting reporting back in 2019 that the Craven Estate was seeking out pitches for a potential next installment in the series. The U.S. rights to the franchise reverted back to the Craven Estate a few years ago, so they’re holding the cards at the moment.
The Elm Street situation is far less complicated than Friday the 13th in that Craven created Freddy and wrote the original screenplay for the New Line Cinema-produced/released A Nightmare on Elm Street. Wes Craven’s estate is the sole owner of the U.S. rights to Freddy and NOES, while New Line Cinema continues to own the international rights.
Wes Craven’s estate can keep it simple and make a deal with Warner Bros./New Line Cinema and keep it all in the family. Or, a slightly more complicated route would be to align with a different domestic distributor (Sony, Lionsgate, Universal, etc.) that would partner with Warner Bros./New Line, the latter of which would handle the international release.
Blumhouse could certainly factory into this equation, but as far as we’re aware no deals have been made. For now, a new Elm Street – with Englund – is merely a Blumhouse dream project.
You can watch Screen Rant’s chat with Jason Blum below.